Elephants with Headlights Read online

  MELBOURNE, AUSTRALIA

  www.transitlounge.com.au

  Copyright © 2020 Bem Le Hunte

  First published 2020

  Transit Lounge Publishing

  This book is copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part may be reproduced by any process without written permission. Inquiries should be made to the publisher.

  Cover design: Josh Durham/Design by Committee

  Typeset in LTC Kaatskill by Cannon Typesetting

  Printed in Australia by McPherson’s Printing Group

  A pre-publication-entry is available from

  the National Library of Australia

  ISBN: 978-1-925760-48-4

  To the women of the world – the eternal flame of the sacred feminine, To the transformational hopes of our mothers, and to my mother, who inspired in me the love of literature.

  PROLOGUE: A CALL FROM THE FUTURE

  NONE OF IT would have ever happened if Siddharth hadn’t received that call from the future. It came disguised as the usual ringtone from his smart phone – a time machine pulsing with numbers and people and deals and connections yet to be made. It was his business colleague who had bought the house in Golf Links from their family and helped him finance his outsourcing company – a motor trade mogul with a pot belly like Ganesh and an appetite for disruption like the Vedic messenger Narad.

  ‘You heard of this driverless car, yah? We’re going to see about getting it out to India, Siddharth, and we could be the first – just imagine.’

  Imagination was something that Siddharth had in fountains – especially when the pragmatics were handled by underlings. All they had to do was to go to Goa, where the science fiction stories he’d dreamed about as a kid were waiting, along with some people from Google who had come out from Silicon Valley to paint a picture of an India catapulted into an unrecognisable new era. This new India was a place where the entire history and forecast of the Earth existed in the same time capsule simultaneously – from the ancient world to a future still waiting to be articulated. And what fun it would be to open that time capsule when the story was told!

  ‘Want to come as part of the investment team?’

  Siddharth was known as a shrewd futurist – someone with demonic insight in his capacity as an angel investor. A businessman who could both move and shake and, even more importantly, ‘smooth the way’ for the momentous changes ahead – a fearless oiler of wheels for the juggernauts of business pushing their way into his country. The pandits (the new ones, that is – not the priestly kind) claimed it was the Asian Century, and Siddharth had no problem at all being a part of the success. Maybe one day when the future called he would no longer be able to answer because he no longer inhabited it, but for now he was part of the invincible subcontinent that was answering the call.

  But driverless cars?

  In India?

  What kind of algorithm or sensor would account for the cow that decided to give birth in front of the Toyota three cars ahead in the traffic jam on the MG Road? Or the cartwheeling, kajalled child beggars by the side of the road? Or the elephants that returned home down the side streets after attending one of those grand Delhi weddings? Why, they’d only fairly recently passed a law that these elephants would have to wear headlights at night – would they equip the prehistoric beasts with sensors next?

  ‘So, you coming to Goa?’

  ‘Why not?’

  Siddharth was not one to regret decisions. He never regretted a business deal that failed, never regretted leaving behind his girlfriend in England when he returned from his studies, and never regretted marrying his wife, although there may have been more than the odd occasion for regret. He did, however, regret his decision to ask his son Neel to come with him to Goa as a reward for finishing his High School Matriculation – and yes, he regretted encouraging him to ‘have a bit of fun on the beaches’ before planning a university education overseas. For if Neel hadn’t seen Mae dancing through the fire that night, he could have kept him at home – and he would never have met the Australian girl who had caused all the trouble in the first place, bringing together two continents that hadn’t been joined since the beginning of time.

  Neel was sitting on a mat, looking at the slow waves lap the shore through a tall fire on a Goan beach – the waves probably slow because he had smoked a lot of bhang. He saw Mae first as an apparition dancing in the flames of the fire, which hovered over the inky sea: she was like a goddess who could survive any torture or affliction (how wrong he was about that), and he kept on staring at the goddess in her dress of flames and dancing hands that reached up to the bonfire’s golden tips. She came into his life like the miracle of fire on water – the sea in the distance – as she danced towards him to sit down on the beach mat opposite his.

  They began a conversation, if you could call it that, even though he barely understood her, perhaps because of the bhang or perhaps because her accent seemed somehow less than English, a slur of syllables and unrecognisable cadences. Still, the words weren’t as important as the kind of electricity that wakes you up in a dream, hard and ready for your evolutionary purpose.

  She sat closer to him, a hallucination: a talking goddess, trying to speak the human language. He mumbled something about being there as a prize for having finished school.

  ‘I’ve just finished school, too,’ she said. ‘But Carrie and I decided we wanted to do schoolies in India.’

  ‘Schoolies?’

  Neel only found out later about the strange traditions of her distant land, where the beaches of her hometown filled up with vomiting teenagers, on account of the fact that they had just finished their Grade Twelve matriculation exams.

  ‘And we wanted to get away from the toolies.’

  He found out, too, about the toolies – the guys who ‘cracked onto’ the girl schoolies who were too inebriated to object. It was as if he was being introduced to a new tongue – this language of ‘schoolies’ and ‘toolies’, together with a world where ladies could go alone to a beach and be groped by unknown men. Not even in the festive rampage of holi would such allowances be made in his world. Why, he and his friends always had to work so hard to get a girl to even look at them, yet here was this foreign goddess who had arrived, absolutely without any propitiation, as if his stare alone (together with some bhang) had the magnetic force required to summon her.

  ‘Your parents don’t mind you travelling together, just two ladies?’ he’d asked. The word ‘lady’ sat well with her. Yes, she could be one of those, she thought. She was far enough from home for it not to sound embarrassing.

  ‘My parents wanted me to go overseas and get some life experience. You know, do a gap year,’ she replied.

  Through his bhang-filled thoughts he tried to imagine such brave parents who would want to send their daughters off to dance on beaches in front of a thousand eyes – to accept the gap in their lives as a natural chasm and wave goodbye to their daughters’ virginities. Yet no matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t quite picture them. His smoky imagination tried to summon an English gentleman in a pinstriped suit, but the man didn’t look like this Australian girl’s father. Then he tried to imagine his parents meeting hers and felt sick. No, their parents had to be absent – the centrifugal force of authority had to be circumvented. The two young ones had to be re-imagined like two colonies granted their independence, unattached now from their colonial umbilicus, free to explore each other’s continents directly.

  And what should they do with such freedom?

  Neel held Mae’s hand and without words he pulled her down onto a mat, which was only large enough for one person and
so required the good patchouli-scented lady to lie down on top of him so that he could protect her hair from the sand. (And this was the pleasure enjoyed by toolies? What gods they were.) For a few minutes he enjoyed the spoils of those toolies, but when he tried to find some words in her language he could only articulate these.

  ‘Do you like India?’

  He said this as he ran his hand under a kalamkari dress of crimped cotton that Mae had purchased only that day from the local bazaar.

  ‘I like you,’ she replied.

  He was Rahu now, a creature planet – the rascal god who stole the sun and ruled at his birth, according to their family astrologer. It took him a few seconds only to feel the skin of her legs – to reach up and find that she was wearing no underpants beneath that kalamkari dress.

  All that was required was that first brush of his hand against the warm, trimmed, thoroughly modern triangle. A finger slipping into a damp cave that led to another country. One very long seaside kiss and he knew he would do better overseas than in the country of his birth, as is the same for all those with Rahu exalted in their charts. His fate was sealed. But his overseas education would have to take place in Australia now, not at an English university like Oxford or Cambridge, or at a last resort Babson College in the United States, as his father had once hoped, because the new world he was entering had new rules. And women, it seemed, were in command of it.

  THE DANCE CLASS

  ARUNJI, THE FAMILY astrologer, had once told Savitri that they were entering the age of the goddess rising – and that being named after a goddess would serve her well. ‘You have powers that you will discover,’ he’d told her once. But on that particular day when Dadi told her to call Arunji, there was no such encouraging prediction.

  ‘Do one thing – make sure you do not go to your dance rehearsal today.’

  The prosaic nature of this advice stalled her. It held none of the profound or prophetic wisdom of seers long gone, nor the visionary poetry of those uttering wisdom from the depths of consciousness. Savitri held the phone away from her face and whispered to her grandmother, withered by her multiple sclerosis, who was clutching her arm in panic. ‘Dadi – don’t worry, it’s nothing serious.’

  ‘Do you hear me?’ Arunji’s voice continued. ‘Under no circumstances are you to go to your dance rehearsal!’

  ‘Okay, okay, Arunji, I will be certain not to go …’ She felt a mixture of disappointment and rebellion. All of the family and a few friends were rehearsing for a Bollywood dance they were going to perform for her brother’s wedding reception. ‘You’re just talking about today, yah? I can go next week?’

  ‘Just today.’

  Odd.

  Savitri was inclined to ignore the request, just as she’d ignored other predictions Arunji had made. Like the time he told her that she’d get married before her brother. What nonsense! His wedding was less than a month away – as if she was going to pick someone off the street and marry him to beat her brother to the finish line. She was tempted to go to the rehearsal anyway – what the hell.

  Dadi amplified the family astrologer’s concerns. ‘But how can you go, darling beti? Remember what happened to Papa when he went to the golf course against Arunji’s advice.’

  Oh, that incident! It had been replayed on the ancient cassette of family mythology for as long as she could remember. Arunji had told her father that he had to avoid the golf course and he’d blindly ignored the prophecy. The fact that he’d been knocked out cold by a golf ball hitting him between the eyes was all the evidence required to confirm Arunji’s sibylline divinatory powers.

  ‘Please, beti. Arunji is our family. He has our best interests at heart.’

  Dadi had known Arunji since he was a little boy who accompanied his father to wash Dadi’s clothes, squatting on the courtyard floor by a square brick sink and cleaning saris and kurta pyjamas and petticoats and tablecloths under many steaming suns. But as Arunji was to later find out, destiny can pivot in a day. Almost forty years earlier, Dadi was walking past this small dhobi as he squatted next to his father, vigorously slapping clothes and swaying to the rhythmic sound of cotton pounding brick. The sun was full glare on white walls and his prospects in life were fully illuminated.

  ‘Why aren’t you at school?’ she asked.

  Dadi didn’t need to wait for the answer. Here was a tiny boy – far smaller than her own son but the same age, and his only life choices were between squeezing out cotton or letting it drip.

  ‘But who will help my papa?’

  Doubtless, the clothes needed ironing after they’d been washed, and of course Gandhi had announced that caste was a sin against humanity and God – and of course she knew the answer to her next question, too.

  ‘What job do you think you’ll have if you don’t go to school?’

  She was interfering with this sin against God and humanity – she knew full well she was meddling with something that was embedded in the circuitry of culture. She knew she was about to handle live electrical wires in an attempt to reroute the forces that be, but what choice did she have? She was a Gandhian and a housewife – the only action she could take towards equality would have to occur within her household.

  ‘Why don’t we send little Arun to school?’ she asked her husband that night all those years ago. It was a contest against fate and history combined with culture. The fact that the dhobi’s father’s father’s father had also been a dhobi didn’t even need mentioning. ‘He is a naturally intelligent and hardworking boy.’

  She was seeing to a rebirth of a kind now – the mother in her knew this much.

  ‘Just let’s see if he does well until tenth grade.’

  This cosmic intervention was nothing short of electrifying. The fact that Arunji went on to become a professor of mathematics at Delhi University was astounding, but it was hardly surprising that he should also become interested in the mathematics of destiny, given the cosmic numbers that had devised this plan to redeem his future all those years ago.

  Dadi remained fearful after Arunji’s latest advice. Not for herself, but for her granddaughter – going off to a dance rehearsal where the dancing Shiva himself could be present, tapping his toes on skulls and laying the world to waste. Her body was tortured with multiple sclerosis and there was nothing she could do physically to stop Savitri except use a little cunning – which she still had command of, thankfully.

  Savitri had hesitated at first to go to the dance class – fighting her inherited sense of rebellion, her refusal to do the bidding of men, as fostered over generations of strong-headed women who resisted permission-seeking and sought to lead. Yet Arunji’s prediction had made her feel as if she was holding on to both ends of a rope in a tug-of-war competition, as she called the ‘spare’ driver to pull up in front of the farmhouse. Together, she and the driver headed down the MG Road, with Savitri in the back listening to the dance track on her headphones, oblivious to her grandmother’s concerns now that they were travelling away from home. Only when the driver pulled over to the side of the road and opened the bonnet did she think to pull out her earbuds and ask what the hell was going on.

  ‘So sorry, madam. Garhi toot gayee.’

  Oh shit!

  He told her that they would be taking a detour to see ‘Sahib’ in Chattarpur Farms.

  ‘No way – you’ve got to be kidding! Fuck, fuck, fuck!’

  The ‘Sahib’ they were going to see was Uncle Hari, her father’s best friend from his university days in England. It’s a ploy. This much was clear to Savitri. Whenever her parents decided to ‘drop round’ to Hari and Susheila’s it was always with the intention of marrying her off to their son.

  Mohan would have been the most convenient and suitable match of all time. But what a disaster their last ‘encounter’ had been! She’d been skilfully avoiding Mohan ever since the night he’d given her too much whisky, disguised in Coca-Cola. The night she’d put her feet in his lap and her head down on a cushion, and she’d felt a crunch. She’d
lifted his cushion and found his porno magazine, with the horrible sight of a defiled goddess on the front cover – a toy, not a woman, with parted plastic legs. Being a literary scholar, she’d tried to remind herself that even in celebrations of Durga Puja, when nine days of the goddess were celebrated, women of faith were depicted collecting earth from the haveli of a prostitute. So why not collect the ‘earth’ from this depiction?

  She started to read the text out loud to Mohan.

  ‘Give it to me, yah. I didn’t buy it. This guy left it here.’

  ‘So you didn’t even look at it?’ Savitri asked.

  ‘No.’

  He stretched down next to her, as if trying to read the magazine for the first time.

  ‘Yah, that position would be so uncomfortable in real life,’ Mohan said, his hand reaching slowly up to one of her breasts as the other reached for the page, to turn it. He was leaning over her. The whisky must have been to blame, because she let him – this man of the world with his libido under a cushion. She let him do what he wanted …

  And now we are going to Mohan’s house! It was a detour to hell. The car pulled off the main road and traversed the lush roads to luxury homes in Chattarpur Farms. Savitri found her spine straightening. Authority has a posture. This much she knew from her work at Kamala Nehru College. She could take on the world if she had a straight back. When the car pulled up she strode confidently up to Hari’s house to knock on the door. Nobody was there. Brilliant! She waited for a maidservant to appear. ‘Mohan Sahib is here,’ she told them, ‘I’ll just call him.’ Oh Shit! Served with a capital S.

  ‘Don’t disturb him. We only want to borrow some tools from your driver.’

  But disturbed he was – the male purusha energy of the universe was awakened. Mohan arrived down the stairs looking dishevelled. He’d been unemployed since his return from Babson College, mostly because he’d been turning down jobs with the same frequency that Savitri had been turning down the boys who were introduced to her with a view to marriage. He walked over to her, his singlet covering muscles that had clearly been developed in the family gym, pulling on his longish hair, his thin legs and tight pants tucked into oversized Doc Martens. They hugged, amicably enough.